As Alberta referendum nears, seeds to dispute results planted online: report

Just days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said strikes on Russian bot farms halted some of that traffic online, social media researchers at McGill University say they’ve found no significant change in “inauthentic” online discourse connected to the Alberta referendum.

However, they’re warning that significant narrative groundwork has been laid to contest the validity of the next week’s vote.

Researchers are McGill’s Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) have been keeping tabs on the online discourse around the province’s referendum which will ask, among other questions, if Albertans want a binding provincial vote on independence from Canada.

With widespread concerns about foreign interference in the vote, a narrative began circulating last week that Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres had led to a drop in online separatist accounts — suggesting those accounts were inauthentic “bots.”

The McGill researchers found no evidence the purported changes in Russian traffic had any effect on either pro- or anti-separatism voices online. But Aengus Bridgman, one of the researchers, said the viral claims provide a window into the fraught nature of the debate.

“The (separatist) movement, as a whole, is very active online, it has this disproportionate footprint, that people look at it and think ‘this feels inauthentic … how is support in this province low for this movement, but their online presence is so big?’” Bridgman said in an interview.

“And the answer that has really been reached for in the national discourse is that there is large, inauthentic activity driving this.”

That hasn’t been the MEO’s observation, Bridgman said. Instead, he said a very passionate, very online community of Albertans is pushing the separatist cause. And because they’re so online, they appear to be a larger movement than they are in terms of voting power.

But the distortion also has an effect on the online separatists, who have started to believe “somehow that their information environment online and the events that they go to online are somehow representative of a broad swath of Middle Alberta,” Bridgman said.

Bridgman gave the example of online separatist seeing a poll of thousands of people online on X.com that indicated 80 per cent support for independence, and have a hard time squaring that with professional polling that almost universally shows the opposite when specifically asking people who are eligible to actually vote in the referendum.

“You have all political communities feeling like the other one is inauthentic, or is dishonest, or is cheating,” Bridgman said.

Federal politicians, including Prime Minister Mark Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, traveled to Alberta this week to bolster the pro-Canada campaigns that have been working against the separatists for months.

National pollsters have consistently suggested that the separatists are significantly outnumbered.